Oscar Wilde Biography and List of Works

Irish poet and dramatist whose reputation rests on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest. Among Wilde's other best-known works are his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which deals with very similar theme as Robert Luis Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. Wilde's fairy tales are also very popular - the motifs have been compared to those of Hans Christian Andersen.

"When they entered they found, hanging upon the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was."
(from The Picture of Dorian Gray)

Wilde was born in Dublin to unconventional parents - his mother Lady Jane Francesca Wilde (1820-96), was a poet and journalist. Her pen name was Sperenza and she warded off creditors by reciting Aeschylus. His father was Sir William Wilde, an Irish antiquarian, gifted writer, and specialist in diseases of the eye and ear. Wilde studied at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (1864-71), Trinity College, Dublin (1871-74) and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874-78), where Walter Patewr and John Ruskin taught him. In Oxford Wilde shocked the pious dons with his irreverent attitude towards religion and was jeered at because of his eccentric clothes. He collected blue china and peacock's feathers, and later his velvet knee breeches drew much attention.

In 1878 Wilde received his B.A. and in the same year he moved to London. His lifestyle and humorous wit soon made him a spokesman for Aestheticism, the late 19th century movement in England that advocated art for art's sake. He worked as art reviewer (1881), lectured in the United States and Canada (1882), and lived in Paris (1883). Between the years 1883 and 1884 he lectured in Britain. From the mid-1880s he was a regular contributor to the Pall Mall Gazette and Dramatic View. In 1884 Wilde married Constance Lloyd (died 1898) and to support his family Wilde edited Woman's World magazine from 1887 -1889. In 1888 he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, fairy-stories written for his two sons. The Picture of Dorian Gray followed in 1890 and the next year he published more fairy tales. The marriage ended in 1893. Wilde had met a few years earlier Lord Alfred Douglas ('Bosie'), an athlete and a poet, who became both the love of the author's life and his downfall. "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."

"Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature."

Wilde made his reputation in the theatrical world between the years 1892 and 1895 with a series of highly popular plays. Lady Wintermere's Fan (1892) deals with a blackmailing divorcée driven to self-sacrifice by maternal love. In A Woman of No Importance (1893) an illegitimate son is torn between his father and mother. An Ideal Husband (1895) deals with blackmail, political corruption and public and private honour. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) concerns two fashionable young gentlemen and their eventually successful courtship. "Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?" (from The Importance of Being Earnest)

Before his theatrical success Wilde produced several essays, many of these anonymously. His two major literary-theoretical works are the dialogues 'The Decay of Lying' (1889) and 'The Critic as Artist' (1890). In the latter Wilde lets his character state that criticism is the superior part of creation, and that the critic must not be fair, rational, and sincere, but possessed of 'a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty'. In a more traditional essay The Soul of a Man Under Socialism (1891) Wilde takes an optimistic view of the road to a socialist future. He rejects the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice in favour of joy.

Although married and the father of two children, Wilde's personal life was open to rumours. His years of triumph ended dramatically, when his intimate association with Alfred Douglas led to his trial on charges of homosexuality (then illegal in Britain). He was sentenced to two years hard labour for the crime of sodomy. During his first trial Wilde defended himself with the literary argument that "the 'Love that dare not speak its name' in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare... There is nothing unnatural about it." Mr. Justice Wills, stated when pronouncing the sentence, that "people who can do these things must be dead to all senses of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them."

Wilde was first incarcerated in Wandsworth prison, London, and then Reading Gaol. When he was at last allowed pen and paper after more than 19 months of deprivation, Wilde had became inclined to take the opposite view concerning the potential of humankind toward perfection. During this time he wrote DE PROFUNDIS (1905), a dramatic monologue and autobiography, which was addressed to Alfred Douglas.

After his release in 1897 Wilde lived under the name Sebastian Melmoth in Berneval, near Dieppe, and then in Paris. He wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. It is said, that on his death bed Wilde became a Roman Catholic. He died of cerebral meningitis on November 30, 1900, penniless, in a cheap Paris hotel at the age of 46.

"Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style. Our very dress makes us grotesques. We are the zanies of sorrow. We are the clowns whose hearts are broken."
(De Profundis) - Quotations from Oscar Wilde, An Illustrated Anthology, Crescent Books 1995

The Picture of Dorian Gray - published first by Lippincott's Magazine in 1890 and in expanded book form in 1891, with six added chapters. The book has some parallels with Wilde's own life. At Oxford he became a close friend of Frank Miles, a painter, and the homosexual aesthete Lord Ronald Gower, and it seems that they both are represented in Dorian Gray. In the story Dorian, a Victorian gentleman, sells his soul in order to keep his youth and beauty. The tempter is Lord Henry Wotton, who lives selfishly for amoral pleasure. 'If only the picture could change and I could be always what I am now. For that, I would give anything. Yes, there's nothing in the whole world I wouldn't give. I'd give my soul for that.' (from the film adaptation of 1945). Dorian embarks upon his wicked adventures, ruins lives, causes a young woman's suicide and murders Basil Hallward, his portrait painter, and his conscience. However, although Dorian retains his youth, his painting ages and catalogues his every evil deed, revealing his monstrous image, a sign of his moral leprosy. The book highlights the tension between the polished surface of high society and the inner life of secret vice. In the end sin is punished. When Dorian destroys the painting, his face turns into a human replica of the portrait and he dies. 'Ugliness is the only reality', summarizes Wilde.

For further reading: Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Karl Beckson (1970); Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism by Rodney Shewan (1977); Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellman (1987); Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel by Norbert Kohl (1989); Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, ed by C. George Sandulescu (1993); by Ian Small (1993) - See also: André Gide, John Keats - Films: Oscar Wilde (1960), dir. by Gregory Ratoff, starring Robert Morley, Phyllis Calvert, John Neville, Ralp Richardson. - The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), dir. by Ken Hughes, starring Peter Finch, Yvonne Mitchell, Lionel Jeffries, Nigel Patrick, James Mason. - Wilde (1998), dir. by Brian Gilbert, starring Stephen Fry, Jude Law, Tom Wilkinson, Vanessa Redgrave, Jennifer Ehle.

Ravenna, (1878)